The accounts which Davy gives of his experiments, as well as of the phenomena which he professes to have observed, may awaken an uneasy doubt as to his absolute integrity; for, it is hardly necessary to point out, he could not possibly have obtained the results which he describes. The presence or absence of light in no wise affects the decomposition by heat of minium; chlorine, as he himself subsequently established, contains no oxygen; and a plant is incapable of decomposing pure undiluted carbonic acid, even in the brightest sunshine. But the work of a youth of nineteen, imaginative, sanguine, and impetuous, with no training as an experimentalist, and with only a limited access to scientific memoirs, cannot be judged by too severe a canon. The faculty of self-deception, even in the largest and most receptive minds, often in those of matured power and ripened experience, is boundless. Davy himself affords an exemplification of the truth of his own words, written years afterwards: “The human mind is always governed not by what it knows, but by what it believes; not by what it is capable of attaining, but by what it desires.” It is not necessary to show how the presumptuous youth drove his hobby with all the reckless daring of a Phæton. Phlogiston and oxygen had in turn been the central conceptions of theories of chemistry; phosoxygen was to supplant them. It was to explain everything--the blue colour of the sky, the electric fluid, the Aurora Borealis, the phenomena of fiery meteors, the green of the leaf, the red of the rose, and the sable hue of the Ethiopian; perception, thought, and happiness; and why women are fairer than men. But Jupiter, in the shape of a Reviewer, soon hurled the adventurous boy from the giddy heights to which he had soared. The “West Country Collection” received scant sympathy from the critics, and the phosoxygen theory was either mercilessly ridiculed, or treated with contempt. There is no doubt that Davy keenly felt the position in which he now stood. His pride was humbled, and the humiliation was as gall and wormwood. The vision of fame which his ardour had conjured up on the top of the Bristol coach--was it all a baseless fabric, and its train of honours and emoluments an insubstantial pageant? All he could plead was that his critics had not understood that these experiments were made when he had studied chemistry only four months, when he had never seen a single experiment executed, and when all his information was derived from Nicholson’s “Chemistry” and Lavoisier’s “Elements.” But his good sense quickly came to his rescue. After the first feelings of anger and mortification had passed, he recognised the justice of his punishment, much as he might resent the mode in which it was inflicted. How keen was the smart will appear from the following reflection, written in the August of the year in which the essays were published:--